[ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI. This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation. If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this. However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution)

plus various OUCHES !! about missing plugins. However, DVDs play perfectly OK in xine in spite of these warnings.

All I'm really trying to find out is if there is any way of turning DMA on for my DVD drive in SUSE. Are the errors I'm getting perhaps something to do with hdparm not being compatible with drives which are labelled as sdx rather than hdx?

]]>2007-10-19T10:52:11+00:002007-10-19T10:52:11+00:00http://linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6758&p=50911#p50911Statistics: Posted by nelz — Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:52 am
]]>2007-10-19T09:37:24+00:002007-10-19T09:37:24+00:00http://linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6758&p=50908#p50908thought hdparm â€“d /dev/hxx was the command to use to check whether DMA was on or not, and it would come back with either using_dma=0 (off) or using_dma=1 (on). And then if you discovered it was off, you used hdparm â€“d1 /dev/hxx to turn it on. And then to make it permanent you add a line at the bottom of the hdparm.conf file. Iâ€™m sure thatâ€™s what I did some time ago in one of my Ubuntu installs. But my SUSE 10.3 is obviously not responding to the command properly.

I'm on a different machine at the moment but will have a look at /var/log/messages and syslog when I'm back on the laptop.

nordle wrote:yep, nav is horrible, it used to be impossible to remove. I took particular offense to the practice whereby you get an annoying message box every 2 mins telling you your sub is about to run out, in 2 months time! Thereby forcing you to renew every 10 months just to get of of stupid message blocking what your doing every few mins.

Indeed, I couldn't agree more. You have to download a Norton uninstaller, which still doesn't remove everything properly. And to add insult to injury immediately after installing NAV I couldn't use Live Update because it told me my subscription had expired and I would have to renew !

It took three separate e-mail exchanges with Symantec to get it sorted. Each time they suggested some great rigmarole of a procedure and it was only the final third suggestion which did at last work. It was all down to a corrupt shared Symantec folder. I decided then and there never to buy another Symantec product.

]]>2007-10-18T19:59:52+00:002007-10-18T19:59:52+00:00http://linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6758&p=50896#p50896Great, I thought. Let's add brokenmodules=pata_ali to menu.lst, which I did. Rebooted and instead of Xubuntu's Grub appearing, I saw the SUSE screen. Um, looks like when I entered the option to YaST's Optional Kernel Command Line Parameter, somehow SUSE also moved its bootloader from its root partition to the MBR. (Is it supposed to do that without asking? ) Anyway, no problem I thought, I'll just boot Xubuntu from SUSE's Grub. But no go, all I got was an error. Was it 13, or 21 maybe, can't remember now.

I then spent about an hour trying to get back into Xubuntu and restoring its Grub to the MBR.

That done, I returned to SUSE which still took at least 3 minutes to boot, which surely is completely unacceptable.

]]>2007-10-17T21:42:28+00:002007-10-17T21:42:28+00:00http://linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6758&p=50877#p50877I've got an aging laptop which requres nodma switch If I want to use the internal cdrom. By using nodma, the cdrom works, but the HD is slllooooooooooow.

not true, actually (in my experience). the problem is with the way some faster or older D or dvd drives implement dma, causing file read failures.after install, dma is restored.

]]>2007-10-17T20:39:20+00:002007-10-17T20:39:20+00:00http://linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6758&p=50873#p50873Rhakios and nordle

Many thanks for your comments. I will have a play around with this over the next couple of days and see how I get on.

Regarding slow XP boot up, I have XP on two desktops - one with NAV installed and one with AVG Free. The difference in boot up times is quite remarkable. I'm convinced NAV is the culprit. Each new version seems to get more and more bloated and I certainly won't be renewing my subscription when it runs out this time.

]]>2007-10-17T20:04:22+00:002007-10-17T20:04:22+00:00http://linuxformat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6758&p=50869#p50869I've got an aging laptop which requres nodma switch If I want to use the internal cdrom. By using nodma, the cdrom works, but the HD is slllooooooooooow.

hdparm -i /dev/hda (where /dev/hda is the hd you've installed OS on) should tell you what method its using. hdparm can also be used to force DMA, but I'm using Windows at the moment so can't remember the details.